OPINION OF THE COURT
I. INTRODUCTION
After Larry Squires was injured in a motor vehicle accident, his automobile in *389 surer Allstate Property and Casualty Insurance Company (“Allstate”) filed an action in the District Court seeking a declaratory judgment that it was not obligated to pay uninsured motorist (“UM”) benefits to Squires under his policy. Subsequently, in response to Allstate’s motion, the Court granted it a judgment on the pleadings on March 2, 2011, as it held that Squires’s injuries did not “arise out of ownership, maintenance or use of an uninsured auto” as his policy required for Allstate to be liable to him for UM benefits. For the following reasons, we will reverse.
II. FACTS AND PROCEDURAL HISTORY
On October 20, 2008, Squires was driving his pickup truck on State Highway 51 in Beaver County, Pennsylvania when he was injured after swerving to avoid an approximately two-foot square cardboard box lying in the middle of his lane. The parties to this action are uncertain as to how the box came to be left on the road but, for purposes of its motion in the District Court, Allstate stipulated that an unidentified vehicle dropped the box. 1 Following the accident, Allstate, after rejecting Squires’s claim for UM benefits, filed this action and Squires responded with counterclaims for breach of contract and insurance bad faith under 42 Pa. Cons.Stat. Ann. § 8371 (West 2007). 2 Allstate then moved for judgment on the pleadings and for dismissal of the counterclaims.
Squires’s policy provides, in relevant part:
[W]e [Allstate] will pay damages to an insured person [Squires] for bodily injury which an insured person is legally entitled to recover from the owner or operator of an uninsured auto. Bodily injury must be caused by accident and arise out of the ownership, maintenance, or use of an uninsured auto.
App. at 44. The policy’s language tracks the Pennsylvania Motor Vehicle Financial Responsibility Law (“MVFRL”), which requires that insurers offer UM benefits in motor vehicle liability insurance policies. 3 The MVFRL provides for “uninsured motorist coverage” as follows:
Uninsured motorist coverage shall provide protection for persons who suffer injury arising out of the maintenance or use of a motor vehicle and are legally entitled to recover damages therefor from owners or operators of uninsured motor vehicles.
75 Pa. Cons.Stat. Ann. § 1731(b) (West 2006). The MVFRL defines “uninsured motor vehicle” to include, inter alia:
An unidentified motor vehicle that causes an accident resulting in injury
*390 provided the accident is reported to the police or proper governmental authority and the claimant notifies his insurer within 30 days, or as soon as practicable thereafter, that the claimant or his legal representative has a legal action arising out of the accident.
Id. § 1702.
Although Squires’s insurance policy— unlike the MVFRL — does not include unidentified motor vehicles in its definition of “uninsured auto,” see app. at 45, Allstate did not dispute — and the District Court, quite reasonably in view of section 1702, assumed — that the unidentified vehicle was an “uninsured motor vehicle” for purposes of the Court’s coverage analysis. 4 Accordingly, the sole issue that the Court decided was “whether an accident caused by a box which fell from an uninsured motor vehicle can be attributed, as a matter of law, to the ‘ownership, maintenance or use’ of an automobile.” App. at 5. The Court answered this question in the negative, concluding that there is UM coverage for policies containing the “arising out of’ language only when a vehicle — and not some other object such as the box — was “the instrumentality causing ... the [ajccident.” App. at 11. Accordingly, on March 2, 2011, the Court granted Allstate’s motion for judgment on the pleadings, denied its motion to dismiss the counterclaims as moot, and dismissed Squires’s counterclaims as moot. Squires timely appealed.
III. JURISDICTION AND STANDARD OF REVIEW
The District Court had diversity of citizenship subject matter jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1332.
5
We have jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291. We exercise plenary review over the District Court’s grant of Allstate’s motion for judgment on the pleadings under Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(c).
See Ehrheart v. Verizon Wireless,
IV. DISCUSSION
The parties agree that Pennsylvania law governs our interpretation of Squires’s pol *391 icy and thus the extent to which it provides coverage, and therefore we apply Pennsylvania law on this appeal. Under Pennsylvania law,
the interpretation of a contract of insurance is a matter of law for the courts to decide. In interpreting an insurance contract, we must ascertain the intent of the parties as manifested by the language of the written agreement. When the policy language is clear and unambiguous, we will give effect to the language of the contract.
Paylor v. Hartford Ins. Co. [536 Pa. 583 ],640 A.2d 1234 , 1235 (Pa.1994). However, where the policy language is ambiguous, it “is to be construed in favor of the insured and against the insurer, the drafter of the agreement.” Dorohovich v. W. Am. Ins. Co. [403 Pa.Super. 412 ],589 A.2d 252 , 256 (Pa.Super.Ct.1991). In an insurance policy, “[w]ords of common usage ... are to be construed in their natural, plain, and ordinary sense ... and we may inform our understanding of these terms by considering their dictionary definitions.” Madison Constr. Co. v. Harleysville Mut. Ins. Co. [557 Pa. 595 ],735 A.2d 100 , 108 (Pa.1999) (citations omitted).
As the District Court recognized, the sole question in this case is whether under the policy and Pennsylvania law Squires’s accident should be regarded as having “[arisen] out of ownership, maintenance, or use of an uninsured auto.” We note that to the extent “the state’s highest court has not addressed the precise question presented, we must predict how [that] court would resolve the issue.”
Wayne Moving & Storage of N.J., Inc. v. Sch. Dist. of Phila.,
we must look to decisions of state intermediate appellate courts, of federal courts interpreting that state’s law, and of other state supreme courts that have addressed the issue, as well as to analogous decisions, considered dicta, scholarly works, and any other reliable data tending convincingly to show how the highest court in the state would decide the issue at hand.
Meyer v. CUNA Mut. Ins. Soc’y,
We start, however, with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court case of
Manufacturers Casualty Insurance Co. v. Goodville Mutual Casualty Co.,
In making our analysis we are aware that Pennsylvania intermediate appellate courts quite broadly have indicated that if injuries are caused by “an instrumentality or external force other than the motor vehicle itself,” the vehicle will not be regarded as having contributed to the cause of the injuries pursuant to the “arising out of’ language.
See Lucas-Raso v. Am. Mfrs. Ins. Co.,
The Superior Court employed reasoning similar to that of
Lucas-Raso
in
Smith v. United Senices Automobile Ass’n,
Relying on
Smith,
the District Court rejected Squires’s claim for coverage as it concluded that “the determinative fact is that the instrumentality causing the Underlying Accident was a box — not a vehicle.”
9
App. at 11. We think, however, that
Smith
is distinguishable from this case, and, when faced with a set of facts similar to those here, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court would hold that Squires’s accident arose “out of the ownership, maintenance, or use of an uninsured auto.” As Squires points out,
Smith
concerned the intentional intervening act of a third party: a person throwing hay from the back of a vehicle. Hence, in line with Goodville’s emphasis on causation in fact, the
Smith
court held that “it is clear that the injury was not caused by the vehicle, but by the boy intentionally throwing hay in Smith’s face.”
Smith,
We have examined the four cases on which
Smith
principally relied but find them to be easily distinguishable from this case as they all concerned intervening actions in situations in which the injuries sustained were not attributable to common uses of a vehicle.
See Roach v. Port Auth. of Allegheny Cnty.,
In support of its position, Allstate points to our decision in
U.S. Underwriters Insurance Co. v. Liberty Mutual Insurance Co.,
U.S. Underwriters clearly is distinguishable from this case. We first observe that while, as here, something physically external to a vehicle caused the injuries in U.S. Underwriters as the grease that directly caused Hipl to fall emanated from a nearby building, the procedural posture of our case requires us to consider that the cardboard box that caused the accident was dropped on the road by an unidentified and thus uninsured vehicle. Consequently, there is a stronger factual causal connection here between the injuries sustained and the “ownership, maintenance, or use” of an automobile than the connection between the injuries and the vehicle in U.S. Underwriters. In U.S. Underwriters we recognized how attenuated the causal connection was between the injury and the vehicle for in reaching our result we relied on the analogous case of Lucas-Raso, which reasoned:
Presently, appellant, who intended to enter her automobile, claims she stumbled after stepping into a snow-covered *395 pothole and was injured as a result. She has failed to show how her vehicle contributed to her fall. Clearly, if appellant had encountered the same snow-covered pothole in a different location in the parking lot, this ease would not be before us. Appellant has offered no connection to link her fall to the use of her vehicle other than her claim that she was en route to enter it. The facts illustrate that it was not the act of entering her vehicle which caused appellant’s fall, and there was no other vehicle involved to break the chain of entry.
Lucas-Raso,
As the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania set forth in
Goodville,
the central inquiry in assessing whether an incident “arose out of the maintenance, ownership, or use” of a motor vehicle concerns causation, which is informed by — but does not necessarily turn on — the “instrumentality” directly causing the accident. Thus, the Pennsylvania intermediate appellate court decisions that have indicated that if “an instrumentality or external force other than the motor vehicle itself’ caused the accident the vehicle will not be regarded as having contributed to its cause may not have precisely applied the
Goodville
formulation. In fact, we think that while the identification of the object that directly caused an accident surely is relevant in a causation analysis, it is not dispositive and does not foreclose the possibility that the accident arose out of the use of a motor vehicle. In this regard, we point out that there may be two or even more causes of an accident.
Lehrer/McGovem v. Workers’ Compensation Appeal Board,
*396
In a case similar to
Lehrer/McGovem
insofar as that case involves an issue comparable to the issue here, the court in
Fox v. State Automobile Mutual Insurance Co.,
We finally note that “the MVFRL is to be liberally construed in order to afford the greatest possible coverage to injured claimants” and “[i]n close or doubtful insurance cases, a court should resolve the meaning of insurance policy provisions or legislative intent in favor of coverage for the insured.”
Houston v. SEPTA,
V. CONCLUSION
For the foregoing reasons, we hold that in light of Allstate’s concession for purposes of its motion for judgment on the pleadings that the accident was caused by a box dropped from an unidentified vehicle, Squires’s accident “ar[ose] out of the maintenance, ownership, or use” of an uninsured vehicle under his insurance policy. We therefore will reverse the District Court’s order of March 2, 2011, granting Allstate’s motion for judgment on the pleadings and dismissing Squires’s counterclaims and will remand the case to the District Court for further proceedings.
Notes
. Squires has contended that another vehicle must have dropped the box because at the time of the accident he was traveling on a limited access highway with no adjacent sidewalks or other means of pedestrian access.
. Neither party contends that the matter in dispute should be resolved by way of the arbitration procedure for resolution of UM claims set forth in Squires's policy. See app. at 48.
. 75 Pa. Cons.Stat. Ann. § 1731(a) (West 2006) provides:
(a) Mandatory offering. — No motor vehicle liability insurance policy shall be delivered or issued for delivery in this Commonwealth, with respect to any motor vehicle registered or principally garaged in this Commonwealth, unless uninsured motorist and underinsured motorist coverages are offered therein or supplemental thereto in amounts as provided in [75 Pa. Cons.Stat. Ann.] section 1734 (relating to request for lower limits of coverage). Purchase of uninsured motorist and underinsured motorist coverages is optional.
. Though the District Court did not directly address the question of whether the policy's language or the MVFRL controlled its coverage analysis, in Pennsylvania "[ilnsurance contracts are presumed to have been made with reference to substantive law, including applicable statutes in force, and such laws enter into and form a part of the contractual obligation as if actually incorporated into the contract.”
Clairton City Sch. Dist. v. Mary,
. At oral argument, Squires’s counsel tentatively represented that the limit of Squires’s UM coverage was $50,000, a possibility that led us to question whether the District Court had diversity jurisdiction as it appeared that the case might not satisfy section 1332’s requirement that the amount in controversy exceed $75,000. However, after oral argument counsel for the parties advised us that Squires’s insurance policy had a UM coverage limit exceeding $75,000.
. The cases we cite show that the question of whether tin accident arose out of the "ownership, maintenance, or use” of a motor vehicle come from numerous different factual situations and thus inevitably will be factually distinguishable.
. We are not implying that in order to recover on his UM coverage Squires will not be required ultimately to show that an uninsured vehicle proximately caused the accident. But at this stage of this case he only need satisfy the requirement to plead facts that could support a conclusion that the unidentified vehicle was a but-for cause of the accident.
. During the time that the hay wagon was on the road it was regarded as an uninsured vehicle.
. The District Court also cited two not precedential opinions but we do not discuss them as we afford them no weight.
. Squires's case would have been indistinguishable from Smith if in Smith the hay had been insufficiently secured while being transported and consequently flew off the wagon and hit the bicycle rider. In that situation the nexus between the "use” of the wagon and the accident would have been much stronger than it actually was in Smith.
. We emphasize how narrow our opinion is. After all, we have decided this case on the basis of an assumed set of facts and it is entirely possible that in further proceedings whether in court or in an arbitration case the facts may appear to be quite different. Moreover, though we are reinstating Squires’s counterclaims we are not suggesting that in this close case we see any merit in Squires's bad faith counterclaim. Rather, we express no opinion on that issue as it is not before us for adjudication. We note, however, that our experience in addressing Pennsylvania insurance coverage disputes has demonstrated that insureds tend to bring bad faith claims when insurers reject their claims even though there are legitimate disputes over whether the claims are covered.